Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team—his brothers—would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late. They relied on an army of remote-controlled cameras and robots, but if that technology failed, a technician would have to don the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk up to the bomb, and disarm it by hand. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But The Long Walk is not just about battle itself. It is also an unflinching portrayal of the toll war exacts on the men and women who are fighting it. When Castner returned home to his wife and family, he began a struggle with a no less insidious foe, an unshakable feeling of fear and confusion and survivor’s guilt that he terms The Crazy. His thrilling, heartbreaking, stunningly honest book immerses the reader in two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror and excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within—the haunting memories that will not fade, the survival instincts that will not switch off. After enduring what he has endured, can there ever again be such a thing as “normal”? The Long Walk will hook you from the very first sentence, and it will stay with you long after its final gripping page has been turned.
About Brian Castner
BRIAN CASTNER, a graduate of Marquette University with an electrical engineering degree, served three tours in the Middle East as an officer of the U.S. Air Force—two of them as the head of an EOD team in Iraq. In 2006, he received a Bronze Star for his service. Upon returning to the United States following his service, he consulted as a independent civilian contractor, training military EOD units on tactical bomb-disposal procedures prior to their deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. He lives in Buffalo, New York, with his wife and children.
Editorial Review
The capitalization is deliberate, for by debut author and combat veteran Castner’s account, that Crazy is something like another person lying inside, more than a shadow within, something that can be neither stilled nor exorcised. The ordinary-Joe author found himself as a volunteer Army officer in Iraq—and not just a soldier, but one with the very special job of disarming bombs. It’s a business of acronyms, EFP (explosively formed projectile) being a particularly dreaded one. “EFP’s are real bad,” writes Castner. “They take off legs and heads, put holes in armor and engine blocks, and our bosses in Baghdad and Washington want every one we find.” Given that demand, a dangerous job becomes even more dangerous, and the “long walk”—the one an explosives disposal expert takes toward the bomb and the task of denaturing it—becomes ever longer. It’s an assembly-line sort of job, one of “stamping machines” and “broken widgets,” in which a single mistake means being vaporized. For Castner, there were no good days. Most days were a blend of boredom and terror, with some more terrifying than others, as with the “Day of Six VBIEDs”—i.e., six very nasty car bombs within 15 minutes. That’s the kind of thing that can wear on a person, to say nothing of the sound of small-arms fire, mortars, bombs and artillery. All of this fed the Crazy, whose “spidery fingers take the top of my head off to eat my brain and heart from the inside out every night.” And the Crazy turns out to be very real, on the way to the dread thing called TBI, traumatic brain injury, which all that exploding ordinance spawns just as surely as cigarette smoking gives way to emphysema. – Kirkus Reviews
‘The Life That Follows’ Disarming IEDs In Iraq
NPR Book Review – July 9, 2012 (Excerpt)
Brian Castner arguably had one of the most nerve-wracking jobs in the U.S. military. He commanded two Explosive Ordnance Disposal units in Iraq, where his team disabled roadside IEDs, investigated the aftermath of roadside car bombings and searched door to door to uncover bomb-makers at their homes.
“We would disassemble the IEDs when somebody else found them; we would go on route-clearance patrols with the engineers to trip the ambushes before they would hit our convoys; and we would do the post-blast investigations,” Castner tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “Hopefully we would find weapons caches and dispose of a lot of this bulk ordnance before it would be used as an IED. … But there was no getting rid of all of the bombs.”
Sometimes those bombs would go off and Castner’s team would be responsible for investigating the gruesome aftermath.
“You would show up and the loved ones would already be picking up bodies or pieces of bodies and they’re already loading the destroyed car onto a flatbed, and it’s bad enough that you’re out there doing this but they’re getting in the way of you doing your job,” he says. “We could be there for 10 minutes. Because the longer you’re there, the more chance you have to get shot at or have a mortar dropped on your head. So you get out as quickly as you can.”
In his memoir, The Long Walk, Castner chronicles his three tours in Iraq and the life that followed when he returned home as a different man, unable to forget what he saw or experienced in Iraq. He describes his experiences as “Crazy” — a term that is often repeated in the book. [Read the full article...]
Collateral Damage - ‘The Long Walk,’ by Brian Castner
The New York Times Book Review – August 17, 2012 (Excerpt)
London, 1940. Capt. Terence Stevenson of the Bomb Disposal Section arrives on the scene to defuse a delayed-action bomb lodged in the rubble of a hospital. He reassures a boy lying only a few feet away, unable to be moved, that he’s just taking out the bomb’s tonsils “so he can’t talk.” Stevenson relays each step in his process through a microphone to his crew, positioned at a safe distance.
“Mister,” the young patient demands, “who are you talking to?”
“Friends of mine,” Stevenson, cool as you like, replies, “telling them what I’m doing. Then if I do anything silly they can tell the next man where I went wrong.”
Because this is the blitz according to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Stevenson efficiently defuses the bomb and plants an insouciant kiss on its case. “The Adventures of Tartu” (1943) is off to a flying start.
In fact, the average life expectancy of an officer in a British bomb disposal unit at the time was 10 weeks. Spectacular failure was a common outcome of a technician’s encounter with a bomb. Yet the Royal Engineers remained undaunted. This was “the Heroic Age of bomb disposal,” declares Maj. A. B. Hartley, the historian of the bomb units and one of the service’s veterans, “a period of individual prowess when urgency and a lack of knowledge and equipment led to the taking of fantastic risks, to fantastic escapes, and to many, many deaths.”
This period was also, explains Brian Castner in “The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows,” the first of two instances in “modern war” during which “the bomb technician found himself a historic fulcrum.” The second was the Iraq war — Castner’s war. A former Air Force officer, Castner commanded an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (E.O.D.) unit in Iraq. Later, as a civilian contractor, he conducted predeployment training in tactical bomb disposal for the military. [Read the full article...]
Stories From A New Generation Of American Soldiers
NPR Book Review – September 11, 2012 (Excerpt)
Iraq War veteran Brian Castner opens his new memoir, The Long Walk, with a direct and disturbing warning:
“The first thing you should know about me is that I’m Crazy,” he writes. “I haven’t always been. Until that one day, the day I went Crazy, I was fine. Or I thought I was. Not anymore.”
More than 10 years since a new generation of Americans went into combat, the soldiers themselves are starting to write the story of war. Three recent releases show how their experiences give them the authority to describe the war, fictionalize it and even satirize it.
Castner was an Air Force EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) officer in Iraq — he defused bombs for a living. But he returned home to a minefield inside his head. “The long walk” is an old bomb-squad term.
“The literal meaning is when you put on the bomb suit, and a single person has to walk up to the IED alone,” he says. “In the EOD world, we call that the long walk — it’s been called that for decades. The long walk at home — I’m not sure if it’s done yet.” [Read the full article...]
THE LONDONDERRY AIR
Testament of an Ulster Gunman A Novel by Garrad Gawler
It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.
With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
